Q&A Webinar with Dr. Robert Hutchison, DVM

Dr. Hutch answered breeders' questions about canine reproduction and shared his extensive knowledge on the subject in this recent Q&A.

Transcript

Mikel Delgado [0:56] I am Dr. Mikel Delgado, and I’m very excited to introduce Dr. Hutchison who probably needs no introduction, but I’m just going to briefly tell you a little bit about his many accomplishments. He’s a reproduction and genetics consultant for the Veterinarian Information Network, also known as VIN. He’s the co-director of the Animal Clinic Northview Incorporated in North Ridgeville, Ohio. He is the president of the International Canine Semen Bank of Ohio, and he has also written many articles on canine reproduction in leading breed journals and magazines, along with many other accomplishments. He is wildly popular with our community, so we’re always happy to have him here. Just to let you know, we got almost 100 questions ahead of time from all of you, so we’re going to do our best to get through as many of them as possible. I’m going to jump right in and start asking the questions. Welcome, Dr. Hutchison.

Dr. Robert Hutchison [1:50] It’s great. I see some of my friends are already logged on here. I cannot think of a better way to spend a November Wednesday afternoon than discussing this with you. Thank you for having me here, and hopefully you’ll ask the right questions, and I’ll answer with the right answers. 

MD [2:11] Let’s start with one about line breeding. How close is too close for line breeding? What’s a no-no, and what’s okay?

RH [2:19] The answer is there is no answer, because it depends on what genes you’re dealing with. Let’s think about it: if you have the perfect dog, what do you want to do? You want to clone it, which is the ultimate inbreeding. Many times, people have a misnomer that inbreeding is bad and outcrossing is good. Line breeding may or may not be good. It really comes down to what genetics you’re dealing with. If you have a good, solid line with health and you are dealing with a lot of issues, then many times, it’s mistakenly thought that geez, I’m doing something evil; therefore I need to cross. That’s the wrong thing, because many times, you’re bringing in other people’s problems. Line breeding is just saying, “Okay, in my pedigree, there’s a dog or a certain group of dogs that I want to concentrate on.” The way you think about it is you look and say, “What are my strong points? And what are my weak points?” If you have a number of weak points, then inbreeding or even line breeding is not going to get rid of those, so maybe you need that cross. This isn’t to say that inbreeding is bad. If you’ve accomplished what you want to, then many times, that’s the way you maintain it. The one thing I think people get confused about is when you’re inbreeding, you’re concentrating recessive traits. That’s why you’re getting consistency in what you’re doing. But many of the defects that we don’t want are also recessive traits: retained testicles, cleft palates, umbilical hernias. Some of the heart diseases are just recessive traits. So when you’re inbreeding, you’re concentrating recessive traits. Sometimes you find out there’s things you don’t want to continue on with. On the other hand, just as mistaken a thought: I’m going to breed my dog to your dog because it’s an outcross, and we’re going to accomplish great things! One of the things you see with outcrossing is you get no consistency, because you’re concentrating on the dominant traits. That’s why, many times, people say, “I outcrossed but no two look alike; the colors are different, and the sizes are different.” Then you start refining from there. The bottom line answer to that question—which is a great question; it’s the one we probably should start with, and I was hoping we would—is the fact that you need to know the gene pools you’re drawing from to determine: Is this something I need to maintain? Do I need to go out and find another dog that maybe has a better length of leg that we need to bring in? Is there a certain group of dogs? Oftentimes, that’s a lot of what we look for. In your mind, if I say a breed—English Springer—everybody has a picture that pops into their mind. But they’re not all the same. But if that’s what you’re thinking of, and that’s the dog you want to breed, that’s where line breeding comes in, because you go back and you find out which generations you can find a stud dog that also is maybe a little higher concentrated on that. But one last thing is how you can determine what you’re doing. You figure you look at a five-generation pedigree: 50% of the genes come from the father, 50% come from the mother, 25% from each of the grandparents, 12.5% from each of the great-grandparents and on down from there. When you start adding up the times a certain dog appears in that pedigree, many times, in a line breeding, you’ll get to where that dog is supplying many genes as what the grandfather was. So, whether that’s good or bad, you have to know your lines. You have to know your pedigrees. To just say inbreeding, outcrossing, line breeding—they’re just words. They’re not things to live by or against.

MD [6:30] That’s a great answer. Obviously it’s not simple, but there are simple things you can do to help you make that decision, it sounds like. 

RH [6:37] For every gene you see, there’s a gene you don’t see. So then you’re bringing in the bitch and the sire; suddenly, you’ve got 50% of the genes that you don’t know are there. Remember, every breeding you do, you’re putting together a combination that’s never been done before. Sometimes, you do that and you say, “Man, was I lucky! They’re beautiful.” Sometimes you say, “Well, maybe we don’t want to do that again.” But that’s what makes dog breeding such an exciting thing. There’s no 100% guarantee of the outcome. It’s all figuring it out, laying in bed and thinking man, I’d really think that dog would cross with my bitch, but I don’t like this about him, so therefore we’re not going to use him. That’s why this is so exciting to us. There is some mystique, I guess, every time you’re doing a breeding. 

MD [7:35] A little element of surprise. 

RH [7:40] Sometimes more than others. 

MD [7:43] We got a few questions about difficulties with tying or mating. Do you have any thoughts on this? What does it mean if the male you want to breed with the female—the bitch is not interested in the male, even though she’s apparently ready? Why does this happen?

RH [7:58] There’s multiple answers to that. First of all, if you’re just saying, “Okay, it’s day 12, and she should be ready to breed,” and he won’t breed or there’s something wrong with him or her—maybe she doesn’t ovulate till day 18. Maybe she ovulates on day 6. Before I start saying there’s a problem, even when you’re doing a natural, sometimes you do your best with a progesterone test. Because I like when everything looks like hey, people weren’t involved; this would get done. But sometimes that’s not going to happen. So you have to say, “Okay, why is he not interested in her?” There are some males who are intimidated by bitches. There are some dogs who, every time they’ve been to a training class or on a walk, they’ve been jerked back multiple times saying, “Leave her alone!” Now suddenly, here it is. You and I are saying, “Okay, all that training I did before, I was lying. Go ahead and breed her.” Sometimes that doesn’t happen. Sometimes when a male tries to breed her and can’t get in, you’re thinking, “Does she have a stricture or a wall?” Especially bitches that haven’t been bred before. But many times, when you’re not getting a tie, you have to look and say, “Am I early?” when you’re still learning the effects of estrogen, if there’s fluid in the tissue and everything is hard and firm. Or am I maybe too late, when everything is struck down? I think you have to classify that into multiple things. Is it a physical thing? Always rule out the physical things first. Check and make sure there’s not a stricture. Make sure the timing is right. I have some males that I deal with, and if the male says he’s not going to breed her, I trust that male. I go and make sure my progesterone machine is working. On the other hand, most males will breed them whenever or try to breed them. Always rule out the physical first. There is an art to developing a stud dog. Sometimes, if you’re a person who exhibits your dogs—you do agility, you do showing, you take them to rallies with dogs—you have to be sure you don’t overcorrect the male dog because you’re teaching him things that are against his instincts. The same with bitches. Sometimes you have to say, “Is this bitch a dominant alpha bitch? Is this a young male that’s not been bred before?” I’ve seen situations where the male comes in, and he’s bouncing off the ceiling. He’s young and excited. The bitch is here, and she’ll turn around and just give him a look. You can feel him go pfft. With that look, anybody would go pfft. You have to determine what the problem is. There are some dogs that just… I remember one Westie I dealt with. She was a fabulous mother. Fabulous puppies. She sired some pretty famous dogs. We couldn’t even collect the male with her in the room. She was so into attacking the male. So rule out physical. Rule out mental. Say, “Hey, could it be me that’s causing it?” If for all those things you’re saying, “I don’t have another reason, but it’s time for her to be bred,” then that’s when we take her in to do a TCI. But I have had people miss breedings because they just stood there, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for Mother Nature to take hold. Mother Nature says, “Hey, it’s not on me this time, if you miss a breeding.” You get so few good, breedable heat cycles in a bitch’s life, you really hate to be missing them because things didn’t get done.

MD [11:51] I appreciate you bringing up the psychological aspect of the training and the mixed messages you might be sending. I hadn’t thought about that. Another question about challenges with breeding… we’ve got some questions about size discrepancies between breeding dogs. One question was: If a small-size Lab bitch has a difficult birth due to the size of the puppies, would using a smaller-size male help?

RH [12:15] Usually not. Again, that comes back to our genes and what we see and what we don’t see. Normally where I’m getting problems with puppies the bitch can’t pass is because of the small litter. Because the bitch actually controls the space she can give the puppies and the amount of nutrition. When people say to me, when they’re going to do a breeding, “Is she going to need a C-section?” the answer is, “Tell me how many puppies she’s going to have.” If she has 2 puppies, the answer is statistically she’s going to need a C-section. If she has 6-8 puppies, probably not. There are certain lines that do produce bigger puppies if you look at average birth weights. There is some knowledge going into it, but especially when a smaller bitch is bred to a bigger male, the bitch only has so much room and only so much nutrition so the puppies aren’t a factor. Again, with some of the crosses we’re doing now, trancervicals are being done because of the fact that the males can’t breed to some of the females, especially with some of the smaller males. To sum it up, the thing that makes the biggest difference to me is the number of puppies. If you have 1-2 puppies, they’re not going to trigger the bitch to go into labor. They’re not going to have competition for space and nutrition. They’re usually going to go a day or two over because they don’t trigger the bitch to go into labor. That’s usually where size becomes a problem, rather than the genetics. 

MD [13:53] We’ll definitely have some questions about C-sections later, but you brought up TCI. We got a lot of questions about artificial insemination and semen samples. To give an overview: Do you have a decision algorithm for when to use these methods? Do you always recommend trying a natural breeding first, or does it really depend on the goals of the breeder?

RH [14:16] So much of my life is using frozen semen, chilled semen. People that come in, just as you mentioned earlier, where the male doesn’t seem to be able to tie to the female and her progesterone says, “Wow, she ought to be prime.” Where all this came about was it was found out in a research project done years ago in Minnesota, back in the 1980s. For frozen semen to be successful, it had to be put into the uterus. Putting it in the uterus, the conception rates were 11% and with the uterus the conception rates were like 84%. So we found out there was a reason to do it. When we first started hearing about these, we’re talking about surgical AI. That was the only method we had of accessing the uterus. It required an anesthetic. It required an incision. It required post-op pain medications. But it was successful. Our frozen semen programs then took off and became wildly successful. We still had it where bitches wouldn’t stand and you had fresh semen. Then we were doing vaginal AIs. But when you think about mimicking a natural breeding, a natural breeding is a very complex mechanical event in the fact that the male penetrates the bitch, the bulbs engorge (which is what causes the tie), the stretching of the vaginal tract (it actually causes some hormone release from the brain that causes the uterus to contract). The other thing, of course, is the tie acts like a cork. As the males ejaculate, you get the first prostatic fluid. The bigger the prostate, the more of that you get. The second is the sperm retraction. And the third part is that prostatic fluid comes out in little bursts. That keeps the semen washed up against the cervix. The cervix is hanging in the bitch. The cervix is above the bladder. You can’t reach it with your finger in the vaginal tract, like you mistakenly think. Cervix is hanging into the semen. It’s pooled in the vaginal tract. The tie is causing the uterus to suck the semen up. It’s a very mechanical, complex process. When we were trying to mimic that with vaginal AIs, many people were doing it too late, because they’d been waiting for a natural, so therefore the tissue had shrunk down. You have these big folds of tissue that take place when a bitch is in season. As the fluid gives out, it’s very easy to get hung up on the folds. Many people don’t realize where the cervix is. For a Beagle, if you look at literature, it’s like 6-8 inches in. If you’re doing a Rhodesian Ridgeback, an English Mastiff, you need a cowman’s rod that’s probably 18-24 inches long just to go in most of the way if you’re doing it properly. It’s difficult to do a good vaginal AI. We elevate the back end of a bitch many times after an AI, just to keep the semen up against the cervix, so the cervix has access to it. Studies show that outside ties, poorly done AIs, your chances can drop immediately 50%. Then flash ahead, where we didn’t want to be doing surgical AIs (major surgery) on every bitch, but it was the only way we had access to the uterus. Then through the magic of cameras and new scopes that we use, transcervicals. It was thought to be impossible. It was thought, not too long ago, that it was impossible to cannulate the cervix of a bitch because the inside diameter is about as big around as inserting a Bic pen. That’s how small it is. It’s not some big, huge thing. It’s actually M or Z shaped, so it’s not even a straight shot. Fortunately, now we use these 5mm flexible catheters. Last year, just in my practice, we did 1,019 transcercivals. It’s become a go-to thing for us. We really do no more vaginal AIs. A transcervical insemination is not a glorified vaginal AI. A transcervical insemination is a surgical insemination that’s done through an existing opening—that’s the difference. I probably used this in these talks before, but 20 years ago, if your dog swallowed a glove, it was major abdominal surgery. It was opening the skin, opening the muscles, isolating the stomach, opening the stomach, removing the globe, suturing all that together. We had to worry about regurgitation. We had to worry about pain control. We had to worry about anesthetic. Now if your dog swallows a glove, we give it a short-acting anesthetic, take a scope, reach into the stomach, pull the glove out, and the dog goes home and eats. That’s the difference between the surgical and the transcervical. We just came through the existing opening as opposed to having to make an opening like before. So do we still do any surgical AIs? We still do. Probably a couple hundred, where a bitch is missed, had small litters, and we want to go in and evaluate the uterus—but that’s the reason we do it. Not because it’s a better access to the uterus, not because it puts the semen in a different place. It just gives an evaluation of the uterus. But it’s really difficult to do a really high quality vaginal AI. Many times, it’s better than if you can’t get a breeding.

MD [20:26] Someone asked, “You’ve bred a bitch using surgical insemination. What options do you have for breeding the second time? Do you have to do a surgical again, or is AI possible?”

RH [20:35] No. If a bitch has a C-section, does she have to have a C-section again? The answer is no. Each breeding is its own individual thing. Back in the old days, we had a number of bitches where we did a surgical because we were breeding with frozen semen. She had a great litter. They said, “This time we’re going to use a live dog.” You would just do a natural breeding. Surgicals and C-sections no way limit your number of breedings, no way limit your access methods. So, no, not at all. 

MD [21:08] One person mentioned they did a TCI. They had frozen English Setter semen. They tried to use it on 2 separate bitches, but no puppies. The first insemination was surgical. The second was TCI. The semen was tested at 35%. Is that too low?

RH [21:27] When you have a bitch that misses, let’s go through that quickly. You have to look at the 6 reasons a bitch misses. Was the semen good? Did she ovulate? Was it put in at the right time? Could it get to the ovary? Could the fertilized egg implant? Did she maintain her progesterone? Those are the only reasons a bitch misses. So, yeah, semen quality. When you’re looking for semen: is 35% good or bad? It depends on how many sperm are packed in there. Why was it 35%? Let’s say you only started out with a total ejaculate of having 20-30% normal, then you start worrying about if those 20-30% are even normal. 

MD [22:15] Do you want to actually break down what that actually refers to? Is that the percent of normal sperm in the semen sample? 

RH [22:21] Basically what you want to do is a semen evaluation; it’s not just one thing. It’s how many total sperm do we have? A normal ejaculate for a male dog is 10 million per pound of body weight. Frozen semen is usually broken down into a couple of breedings. Depending on your breed, it may be 125, 150 million. Even in the giant breeds, very seldom do we do more than 200-250 million. But then when you have the total numbers, you have to decide what percent of those are normal. Abnormal sperm does not make abnormal puppies. Abnormal sperm makes no puppies. If you have a gazillion sperm but none of them are normal, you basically have no sperm. In this case, in the 35%—what were we starting with? Were we starting with 80% normal? Now we only have 35%, was there something with the semen not surviving the freezing? On the other hand, if you start out and say, “We only had 35% normal sperm; this was an old dog, and I really just want to get his puppies if we possibly can,” then 35% may be good. But hopefully that was taken into account, the number of sperm that were packaged. The other thing with normal sperm is you like to have 80% or more motility if possible. But then it comes down to what percent are quail tails? What percent are detached heads? The morphology is probably, in my mind, the most important part of a sperm count. In cases as that one, sometimes when you say maybe the third time of breeding this bitch, we’ll breed her to a live dog and find out if it’s her. Because ⅚ things I mentioned when a bitch misses is because of the bitch. If we breed her, and we say, “Holy cow! We bred her to a live dog, fresh semen, and she still didn’t have puppies,” then we’re probably doing a uterine biopsy. If you go ahead and breed her and say, “Wow, she had 11 puppies when we bred her naturally,” then the next time you come back, this is probably when you want to do multiple-sire breeding. Multiple-sire breeding is when we use the semen that’s maybe the poorest quality (the one we have some suspect on), we use it giving that sperm every chance to be successful, but then we follow up with another dog so this bitch doesn’t go through the whole lifetime, and we get to a 7-year-old bitch and say, “Hey, we kept using that semen every time, and now she’s 7 and we never had a puppy from her.” That’s where the slots go. You have to always do something more the next time. Let’s go back. Let’s do an evaluation of the semen. What was the original count? If we thaw a drop, what does it look like? What was the morphology? If the sperm is moving, but it’s flopping back and forth, that usually indicates it has cold shock. That may indicate there was something with the freezing or thawing process. If the dog was old when he did it and had prostate disease, then you start saying, “Was that maybe the cause?” You start working your way through that list of the 6 reasons. You evaluate the semen. Should it be working? I get some semen that I use from old dogs. They have prostate problems. Their count was low. But we said, “If you don’t use it, you know you’re not going to get any puppies. Why not give it a try?” That’s really one of the big values of the multiple-sire program, to be able to use the semen and take a chance on the semen without missing the bitch.

MD [26:12] If you’re having semen trouble, would you want that semen analyzed before shipping or do you have your repro vet analyze it after, before you use it? 

RH [26:23] The answer is when I receive frozen semen, I would expect—if I’m not the one that froze it—there to be paperwork that comes along with it, saying this is what they estimated the post-thaw motility to be, this is the total count. You don’t want to be sacrificing semen just to do a count. When my technicians thaw it, we say, “They said they got a 70% thaw.” If we get 70%, we’re saying, “Things look the way they should!” If they say, “We got 70%” and my technician says, “It’s only 35%,” then we’re saying, “Does it need to warm up more? Do we need a different extender? Is the PH of the semen different from what the thaw immediate is?” When it comes, it should tell you. A very important thing I think we need to mention is that if you’re buying frozen semen, it’s coming in straws. It says on the paperwork how many straws were suggested to make up a breeding by the people that froze it. Sometimes you only need 2 straws. I’ve had cases where you need 10-12 straws to make up a breeding. I just mention that because when you’re buying it or getting it from somebody, look at the paperwork and be sure they’re giving you the proper amount of straw that is suggested for the breeding, which would be a reflection on the male’s semen evaluation when he was inspected.

MD [27:55] That’s very helpful. We’re getting some questions about dogs who are not going into heat. What do you do?

RH [28:00] That’s a tough thing right now, in the fact that what keeps a bitch from coming in season is some bitches are just later than others, having their first cycle. So I really don’t become panicked until a bitch reaches 24 full months of age without reaching a heat cycle. If a bitch has had a heat cycle, then I expect the next one to be within a year. Some, 9-10 months are just normal. All bitches across the world—I think the average is 7 months between heat cycles. When a bitch ovulates, the progesterone stays up for 2 months, and then it drops back down to baseline, as we all know. So why does the bitch not come back into season? That’s because there’s another hormone in the brain called prolactin that maintains the rest of the interval until she’s ready to come into season 6 months or 7 months afterwards. One of the things that we will do on a bitch that has cycled previously and is not cycling again is put them on a product called Cabergoline, which is an anti-prolactin drug. That does not induce a heat cycle, but what it does do is it actually, by lowering prolactin, says to the bitch, “If you’re being kept out of season because of prolonged prolactin, then you ought to come into season.” And 70% of them do. I love those heat cycles because those are normal heat cycles. They’re not induced. What I lived by for years and years—there was a 2.1 milligram Deslorelin implant we were using. We had FDA approval for that. That’s not being manufactured now. And that was fabulous, because the bitch would come in season in 5-7 days, she’d ovulate for 5-7 days. It was magic. You could time a bitch just the way you wanted to. Those are not being produced / are not readily available right now. The only Deslorelin implants in the US right now are 4.7, which are only for ferrets. It’s black-box listed; it is against the law to use these in any species other than ferrets. I won’t use them because it’s not ethical to use them. But I’m hoping we can get the 2.1s back. Those really were the things. 

There are things that don’t make a bitch come into season. We used to think: thyroid. We know thyroid has very little, if anything, to do with reproduction. Low thyroid is not going to cause a bitch not to come into season. Stress could. If a bitch is being campaigned heavily, if a bitch is in a situation to be stressed, if for some reason she’s on steroids, that could stop a bitch from coming into season, because it feeds back to the pituitary. Some bitches will have ovarian situations. Probably more commonly, we’ll see bitches that will come into season and not ovulate and then they’ll go back out of season. If they’re normal, there’s what’s called a split-cycle common in Northern breeds. Those bitches will come back in season in 6-8 weeks; that’ll be the ovulatory cycle. You can breed them. You just have to be aware of which is the ovulatory and which is the non-ovulatory. If we have a bitch who came into season, her progesterone got up to 2-6 nanograms, which would be 6-18 nanomoles, and then went back down and didn’t ovulate—if she did that a second time, then we’re ultrasounding and looking at her ovaries, CAT-scanning, looking to see if she has cystic ovaries or something like that. The cyst on the ovaries are progesterone-producing. If you aspirate the cysts, many times, the progesterone that you draw will be 400 nanograms, which will be 1200 nanomoles. It’s negative feedback. It’s why the bitch doesn’t come into season. 

Why does the male not breed the bitch? Why does she have to have a diagnosis? There’s nothing that’ll arbitrarily go: Poof! And she comes into season. Poof! Your sperm is normal. You have to have a diagnosis. So when people say to me, “My male is having bad sperm. What’s the treatment?” I don’t know. What’s wrong with him? It’s just like anything else. If a dog is coughing, does he have kennel cough or heart failure? 

MD [32:43] Let’s talk about pre-breeding exams. What’s the best time to do a pre-breeding exam and a Brucellosis test on a maiden bitch? 

RH [32:53] Basically on a maiden bitch, I would say oftentimes we run the Brucellosis when we do the first progesterone, because we have a quick turnaround on that. Usually, that’s the same time that we’ll go ahead and check vaginally, to make sure there’s not a stricture or a vein. Otherwise, you want to be sure the bitch is in good weight. But there’s not a whole lot to do in a bitch, pre-breeding. Vaginal cultures, which used to be so popular in the 1980s, we now know are just a waste of money. Thyroid, which we used to do all the time, we know is a waste of money. Basically, all you wanna do is be sure the bitch is healthy. Be sure she doesn’t have a vaginal stricture. Do her Brucellosis. That pretty much makes up a pre-breeding exam. In a pre-breeding exam on a bitch that’s either had a litter, missed a litter, then it starts coming in: If she had a litter and everything was working well, we probably do pretty much the same: do the Brucellosis. Do the progesterone. Talk about the male you’re using. What does his semen look like? If the bitch has missed before, then we start going down our checklist: Was the semen good? How did you time it? Was it a natural breeding? Was it an AI you did with a turkey baster in your garage? Different things like that. Those are the ones that’ll come down to a uterine biopsy, something like that, looking for a diagnosis. There’s just not a whole heck of a lot you need to do in a bitch pre-breeding, other than the things we mentioned. 

MD [34:32] Can you speak to canine herpes virus? We had one person who lost a litter at 52 days, due to canine herpes virus. Their bitch had to be spayed, as one horn was severely compromised. 

RH [34:47] Let me say: I’m a skeptic. Herpes is a virus. It’s one of the more common viruses that dogs are exposed to. It’s part of the kennel cough complex. Dogs that have been to shows, classes, boarding kennels probably have a herpes titer. You can check a blood sample and find out. Bitches that have not been bred before, bitches that haven’t been around other dogs—these are the ones that don’t have either protection themselves, for herpes, so if they’re around a dog with kennel cough that is herpes, remember: there’s 26 different organisms that cause kennel cough and herpes is just one of them, and it’s one of the milder ones. Herpes can cause placentitis (an inflammation of the placenta). That’s not going to cause a bitch to have her uterus removed. Just like Brucellosis. Brucellosis causes placentitis. The bitch aborts, but it doesn’t damage the uterus. It’s the placenta. That’s why I don’t know. Something didn’t fit there. On the other hand, usually where we see the herpes affecting the puppies is after they’re born. It’s usually puppies who the bitch didn’t have protection to pass through the colostrum, or the bitch didn’t have milk or the puppy was weak and didn’t get colostrum. That’s a critical part. Puppies that didn’t get colostrum have a shorter life expectancy. Herpes, in puppies whose body temperature is under 100 degrees which is the first 3 weeks of their lives—suddenly it’s not just the mild cough that it is in adults. It causes a very ravaging hemorrhagic disease. You get these big hemorrhage polka dots on the kidneys. Usually, herpes is going to cause more puppy problems between day 7-10 up to about 21 days, which is when their body temperature gets over 100. You can get placentitis but if the bitch has a titer of her own, she shouldn’t get that either. So it’s really pretty unusual to see herpes problems because herpes is so common, and most individuals have protection against it. But if you do a placentitis, whether it be E. Coli, herpes, Brucellosis (just to name a few of the things that would cause puppies to be aborted), usually it doesn’t damage the uterus, and usually the next go-around, especially with herpes, the bitch would have a titer and it would not be a recurring problem. 

MD [37:29] This leads very nicely into the next topic; we got a lot of questions about routine antibiotic use during pregnancy. People mentioned hearing that since bitches lose litters due to bacterial infections, should they just be given routine antibiotics prior to breeding and/or during pregnancy? 

RH [37:51] First of all, vaginal bacteria is not a cause of bitches missing. All these routine things we used to do: culturing and coming up with antibiotics—it’s worthless. There was a study out of Europa, a very extensive study, where they found out that vaginal bacteria and pre-breeding antibiotics and all that made no difference, in either conception rate or litter sizes. That’s one. Second of all, bacteria is not a big cause of puppies being lost during pregnancy. Not a big cause of bitches missing. What made me realize this is I do an extensive amount of uterine biopsies. I do these uterine biopsies at about the time the puppies would be due. These are bitches where everything was perfect. The semen looked good. The progesterone was good. They ovulated and all that. I was really curious at the time when I started doing this: Was I going to find mycoplasma? Remember back when mycoplasma was the big to-do? Was I going to find E. Coli? Was I going to find staph? Strep? Some weird bacteria? The answer is: when you do these uterine biopsies that miss, and you do an entry uterine culture (these are bitches that missed but everything was perfect), you never grow anything. After a time (the first 200-400 of these), I said to myself, “If all these bacteria that we worry about pre-breeding and culturing were so worrisome, where are they??” They’re not there. There was a study that on certain bitches, they showed pre-breeding antibiotics made no difference. For some bitches, the conception rates went up 12% on bitches who were put on antibiotics after breeding for 10 days. The theory behind this is that the bacteria we know, when the cervix is open, pass through to the uterus; it passes back and forth. This is a known fact. It actually attached to the lining of the uterus. E. Coli actually has a number of attachment sites. The body removes them. The body eats them up and gets rid of them. We have extreme inflammation; that’s when you have bitches that end up with pyometritis. That is when you have a secondary infection, but you can’t prevent pyometritis with antibiotics. You can’t cure it with antibiotics. It’s caused by progesterone. If you start putting them on antibiotics to prevent pyometritis, it doesn’t happen. But in these bitches, where we thought maybe it made a difference to put them on after breeding, it was—so, say if we lowered the number of bacteria (especially E. Coli) that the body had to remove, and we know that the main goal in the bitch is keeping uterine inflammation (which is caused by progesterone) to a minimum, that maybe if we reduce the number of bacteria that the body has to remove, would this subsequently reduce the irritation of the uterus itself? That’s where we sometimes use them after breeding. We use none pre-breeding. We used to put them on for the full pregnancy, and now we look back and say, “Wow, was that crazy!” There was this study that actually showed if you put bitches on a lot of antibiotics during pregnancy, the puppies have a decreased immune system. If the bitch gets a bladder infection during pregnancy, you can use amoxicillin, baytril. These are all extremely safe antibiotics. To just put them on it for breeding is not something that would really be suggested. 

MD [42:17] What can you do to prevent a bitch from reabsorbing fetuses? 

RH [42:25] Why is she reabsorbing them? There’s probably three reasons. One of them is the uterine lining. Is it fibrotic? Is there scar tissue? Is it cystic? Is there some reason that prevents the placenta from growing to a certain point? Up until day 38, the body can reabsorb all of the puppies. If there’s something that prevents the placenta from growing, the puppies can be reabsorbed. Second of all, if the bitch prematurely drops her progesterone—English Mastiffs, Leonbergers, Cavalier King Charles, Weimaraners are just some of the breeds that we see this in. If the progesterone drops, the body doesn’t say, “Wait! I’m supposed to wait 63 days to get rid of these puppies. The progesterone drops, and the body says, “Goodbye!” Up until day 38. The third reason is if there’s genetic issues with the placenta or the puppy itself. Usually, that’s not going to be where all of them are absorbed. Interesting fact is that there is another study out of Europe that showed that 30% of all pregnant bitches reabsorb at least some of the puppies. These are probably the ones that have genetic defects. You’ll notice on my list of the three causes, infection is not one of them. When infection becomes involved is if you say: “What are the causes? My bitch aborted the puppies.” Aborting the puppies is totally different than reabsorbing. You have to confirm the puppies were there at one time to say the bitch reabsorbed. I get a lot of people that come in and say, “Her nipples got a little bigger. She was cuddly. She must have reabsorbed the puppies.” Those are progesterone signs. Those are not pregnancy signs. You have to confirm they were there to say they were reabsorbed. A bitch can reabsorb puppies up to day 38. Aborting, of course—then you start thinking more about infections. We talked about herpes. We talked about Bordetella, E.Coli, different things like that. Premature drop in progesterone is probably the number one cause I see in bitches that abort puppies, simply because the body thinks it’s time to get rid of them; they’re beyond the reabsorption phase. Trauma is probably a very, very, very rare cause of bitches aborting puppies. The uterus hangs like a hammock. The puppies just swing around. You couldn’t get rid of the puppies if you wanted to. If I have a bitch that’s aborting, I’m considering what’s the uterine lining status? Do we need to be doing a uterine biopsy? What’s her progesterone level? Is she prematurely dropping? Next time, we’re probably going to want to supplement progesterone. If you have a bitch that aborts puppies, save the placentas. My pathologist can get more information from the placenta than they do from the puppy. That’s how they’re going to tell if there was an infection. That’s how they are going to tell if there are viral inclusions, placental infarctions. The placenta is really interesting in the bitch because it grows almost all the way through the uterus. Sometimes it doesn’t stop. It can go into the muscular layer. It can go into the serosal layer. I’ve even had a few bitches where the placenta grew outside the uterus. If you get to a point like that, it shuts the blood supply off to the placenta. You’ll get these placental infarctions that’ll stop the blood from getting to the puppies. If you have a bitch that aborts, save the placentas for histopathology. Look at the progesterone at the time the puppies were aborted. That’s the way you’d handle it. There’s not the same treatment for two different problems.

MD [46:25] We get a lot of questions about the low progesterone. Is that really that common, or is that an easy excuse?

RH [46:32] For certain breeds. I threw out some breeds. If I had an English Mastiff or a Leonberger right now, I would automatically check progesterones. 

MD [46:44] Throughout the pregnancy?

RH [46:46] If there have been previous issues. But oftentimes, we ultrasound them around day 23. We’ll check a progesterone at that time, just to give us an idea of where we’re starting. You don’t need a lot of progesterone to maintain a pregnancy. You only need 2.5 nanograms.For those Canadians, multiply nanograms times 3.14. That’s your normal. Second of all, it depends on the number. If you supplement progesterone and don’t need it, there’s a birth defect of the bitch’s puppies. Too much progesterone is as bad as not enough. It’s like walking a tightrope. Let’s say you have two bitches. They’re both ultrasound pregnant. The one bitch comes back, and her progesterone is 10 nanograms. Will we supplement then? No. No! You’ll probably check another one in a week. This other bitch—same breed—her progesterone came back 28, which is not uncommon. I might not check her for 2-3 weeks. Basically, not following a recipe: treating each one as an individual. We supplement progesterone when we have longer than 5 days remaining in gestation, and the progesterone gets around 5 nanograms or below. I use a progesterone oil because we’re supplementing, not replacing. That’s a big, big difference in words. Supplementing is adding to. Progesterone oil injections will show up on a progesterone test. I can have you bring your bitch back in in 3 days. I can run her progesterone and say, “She’s good. We don’t need to supplement yet,” or some bitches need it supplemented every 3 days. There is an oral progesterone that’s used in mares. The problem with this is that it’s a synthetic progesterone. It won’t show up on a progesterone test, so our veterinarians who use it because it’s oral and not injectable but you have to give it every day—you can’t measure it. To me, I’m just hard-pressed to be supplementing medicine where I can’t tell if it’s too high or too low or whatever. But there are people that like Regumate. I use the injectable for that reason. You brought up a very excellent question: Is this something that is epidemic in dogs? The answer is absolutely not: 90% of the breeds that I do, I never check a progesterone. I want to emphasize that. Just because your bitch is pregnant at ultrasound, I’m not going to check her progesterone now. Most bitches don’t need it. If it’s the breeds we mentioned or if there’s a previous history of losing puppies, then of course we will. But the bitch doesn’t change the source of progesterone from the ovary. So it’s really there. But most breeds, you don’t need to do it. Interesting that when I looked at some of these ovaries myself with my pathologist from Cornell, it looks like it’s more of an immune-mediated reaction against the ovary as opposed to ovarian failure. It probably is the reason why some of it will follow some family lines. If you say, “Wow, that’s a genetic defect I don’t want in my lines,” and spay the bitch—to me, if all a bitch needs is 3 injections of progesterone to carry a beautiful litter and that’s the problem you have—you’re better off than most! 

MD [50:38] Are radiographs safe during pregnancy? Some questions about the pros and cons of X-rays versus ultrasounds. 

RH [50:47] The answer is yes. If they’re properly done. If you have a bitch that’s pregnant and diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma and needs radiation therapy, radiation is dangerous. If you’re talking about that little split-second X-ray that you take to find out how many pups are coming, that’s totally safe. I talked to my radiologist about that a number of years ago, and he said, “Really, people don’t realize their television sets and all that give off more radiation than a split second digital X-ray, which is columnated down.” In my lifetime, by knowing puppies that should be coming by knowing how many are there, and them not showing up, we’ve saved an awful lot of puppies and made an awful lot of extra litters, and we probably saved an awful lot of bitches from becoming toxic and septic by knowing. To me, X-raying for numbers is probably as important as breeding. There was that big thing: Is ultrasound dangerous? People ask me those questions. If we take an ultrasound and go to the animal shelter and ultrasound all of the bitches, would the pet overpopulation problem be solved? They say, “No, that’s ridiculous.” It is ridiculous. It’s difficult to get rid of puppies in a pregnant bitch if you want to. Trauma and all that— “She fell off the bed; is she going to lose the puppies?” No. The answer is follow through with what makes sense. Your breeding individuals are totally different than mine or yours or the person next door. You have to look and say, “What is my problem?” You can’t go on the Internet and say, “Wow, I’m going to buy these supplements!” Because I’m not a supplementer. In my 45 years of doing this, I can’t think if I ever saw a bitch that missed conception because she was under-supplemented. But I’ve seen a lot of them that are probably over-supplemented. The things you have to say: find out what is the problem. Is it genetic? Work on your own problem instead of going on the internet because of somebody else’s problem. I just want to put this in: there are certain breeds right now that we really are concerned about. Should that breed be spayed? These are the ones that we think are probably genetically carrying the sarcoma gene. Osteosarcoma (bone cancer) or hemangiosarcoma (blood cancer), spleen, liver, heart, lymphosarcoma. In certain breeds, now we’re doing things like ovary-sparing spays. After spaying, we’re putting them on hormone replacements, or doing vasectomies. Once again, let me name a few breeds: Golden Retriever, Labrador Retriever, Irish Wolfhound. It is not every breed. When people come to me with a Yorkie and say, “I want to do an ovary-sparing spay because I read on the internet that spaying causes cancer.” First of all, it doesn’t. What actually causes the cancer—one of the triggers—is luteinizing hormone. That’s put out by the pituitary. If you have one of those charts—pull it up—of a normal bitch’s cycle, where you have follicle-stimulating hormone dropping, estrogen going up, and you get this little 12-24 hour spike of luteinizing hormone, which causes the eggs to go and then you have the progesterone go up—if you spay or neuter a male because there’s no feedback to the brain, the luteinizing hormone goes up and stays up. We also think this is now the cause of bitches that leak urine after they’re spayed. It’s luteinizing hormone. There are certain breeds where I have serious conversations with people who come in, saying, “What should I do? Should I spay? Should I do an ovary-sparing spay? Vasectomy?” Those are individual, specific problems. They are not an encompassing, all breeds/all individuals thing. It’s actually a very specific group of individuals. 

MD [55:16] I really appreciate that. There’s not a one-size-fits-all answer when we often want one. 

RH [55:22] Maybe that should be the whole purpose of our talks here, to tell people there is not one-size-fits-all. Your problem with your frozen semen not working may not be my problem because my bitch is 9 years of age. Why doesn’t the frozen semen work? All that kind of stuff. There’s a lot of factors that come into play. 

MD [55:43] We’re almost out of time, but I thought it’d be fun to end the session on a note where we’re looking to the future, which is: Where is the field of canine reproduction headed? We got this great question: “We’ve been able to collect and freeze canine semen for some time. Are we able to harvest bitch’s eggs for storage? Can we collect, fertilize, inseminate, and do embryo transplants yet? When is this going to happen? Is this going to happen?”

RH [56:10] I’ll tell you what: We had a little brief conversation on this the other day. If in 1990, you would’ve told me that in 2022, we would not be doing embryo transfer in the bitch, we would not be doing frozen embryos, we would not be doing IV fertilization—I wouldn’t have believed you. It’s just been shown that the bitch is so unique. It goes back to why it was so difficult to clone a dog as opposed to a cat, a horse, a mule, sheeps, cows. A couple of things: There was a frozen embryo puppy born. It was a doctor of one of the universities who’s no longer in the country (he went back home) but it was a rarity that that happened. There was some work on some of the insemination where you take one sperm, put it on one egg (similar to in humans), but a lot of this is research. It’s not easy in the bitch. Three things are holding us back. There’s not a commercial reason to do this. How nice would it be! A bitch’s uterus starts to wear out at 6 years of age from her own heat cycles. How great would it be to breed a 10-year-old bitch through embryo transfer to a younger bitch? Even trying to flush embryos from the bitch—after a bitch ovulates, the muscles of the uterus clamp down. It almost looks like a barber pole. People who were trying to flush embryos (usually for STEM cell research) found out you can’t flush them in the bitch. The only way you can get the embryos is by going in and surgically removing the uterus. The third thing is the bitch’s heat cycle is so long that you have to correlate it so that you’re putting the fertilized egg from one bitch into another bitch’s uterus at about the same time. All these things turned out to be headaches. In mares, for example, to breed a horse: you transfer the embryo to another mare. This time, she went back on the track. She had a race the same day she had fowls. She didn’t have labor pain. It’s easy to do in some of those other species: cows, horses. But the bitch is just so unique. I have a number of famous bitches whose ovaries we froze—whether the ovaries will someday be used, there’s a couple of different possibilities. In one, we would be taking a strip of that ovary and putting it around the ovary of another individual and letting that be the one that actually supplies the blood supply so the follicles develop. Some people use it on mouse ovaries to get the follicles stimulated to remove them. There’s all these different theoretical things, but as far as a lot of research being done, more so than just curiosity and fun—not a whole lot that I am aware of. If someone knows about all the hidden things taken place that no one’s told me about, please tell me. But I’m out and about pretty much, and it just doesn’t appear that in the next year… who knows? I’m confident that someday it will be. But then it comes down to saying how important is it? To certain ones of us, some of those ovaries I’ve gotten frozen from some famous bitches—to those people, it’s probably really good. But let’s face it: where is most of the money right now in research in canine reproduction? It’s more in preventing reproduction than it is in enhancing reproduction. 

MD [59:52] This was fantastic. Thank you so much! Thank you to everyone who sent in questions ahead of time and who sent in questions during the session. I also wanted to alert everybody that we have a new feature on the Good Dog website, in the Good Breeder Center. Click on Health, and we have our Breeding FAQs, so if you have questions, you can submit them there. We are gathering resources related to the questions you always ask. You can find those resources there, including links to some of Hutch’s previous webinars and some of his choice pearls from previous interviews. Dr. Hutch, thank you again for entertaining all of these questions. You answered every single one and didn’t say, “I don’t know” once!

RH [1:00:37] Well, I’ve been around a long time. But remember: there’s always too many dogs but never enough good dogs. Thank you everybody.